INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - A tree that gave Anne Frank hope as the Jewish teenager hid from Nazis for more than two years is taking root at nearly a dozen sites across the United States in hopes of promoting tolerance.

Eleven saplings grown from seeds taken from the chestnut tree that stood outside the Amsterdam home in which Frank and her family hid are being distributed to museums, schools, parks and Holocaust remembrance centers through a project led by The Anne Frank Center USA.

The first sapling will be planted in April at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Other saplings are being sent to a New York City park honoring 9-11 victims, a Little Rock, Ark., school that was the center of a desegregation battle and sites in Massachusetts, California, Idaho, Michigan and Washington, D.C.

The now-diseased chestnut tree that comforted Frank while she hid from the Nazis during World War II has now been granted a reprieve. The 150-year-old tree was due to be chopped down after experts determined it could not be rescued from the fungus and moths that caused more than half its trunk to rot.

The tree is familiar to millions of readers of "The Diary of Anne Frank." It stands behind the "secret annex" atop the canal-side warehouse where her family hid during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and its crown was just visible through the attic skylight, the only window that was not blacked out.